What Happens to the Junk Surrendered at TSA Checkpoints?

Don't bother searching online auction sites for pocket knives handed
over to airport screeners, at least not those surrendered at the San
Luis Obispo County Regional Airport.

While some airports around the country give the contraband to schools or
hand it over to nonprofit organizations -- which raise funds by selling
the confiscated items online -- the local airport is among many in
California that sends the stuff to another federal agency, which then
throws it all away.

"Everything gets destroyed," said Craig Piper, a security coordinator
employed by the local airport.

Everything, however, except the more intriguing items kept on a
bookshelf as a trophy case of sorts in the airport office of the
Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency created in
the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that oversees the
screening of passengers at the nation's airports.

The shelf contains obvious weapons like switchblades, short- and
long-bladed knives and brass knuckles, but also items like lighters that
look like guns and combustible materials in spray cans.

There are two leather straps that passengers described as page-holders
for books, a local TSA screener said.

The straps, however, have a metal weight in one end, and the screener
demonstrated convincingly how it could be used as a blackjack to
bludgeon someone.

Federal authorities in charge say the relatively small haul of items
collected at the airport is taken to the dump, though some metal objects
may be melted down for scrap.

According to federal figures on airports nationwide obtained by the
Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City, screeners at the San Luis Obispo
airport confiscated more than 11,000 potential weapons from nearly
360,000 passengers from February 2002 to March 2003.

The local rate of 29 potential weapons per 1,000 passengers is higher
than at the largest airports in the nation, but then the airports with
the highest rates were among the smallest in the country.

Despite the figures, the TSA announced a plan last month to reduce by
Oct. 1 the number of screeners at San Luis Obispo's airport to 13 from
the current 21.

Federal authorities prefer the term surrender to confiscate, since
passengers are not technically required to hand over the items -- they
can give them to a loved one not flying, throw them away or put them in
their cars parked nearby.

The federal agency has given the surrendered items to the Santa Barbara
office of the Department of Justice, which disposes of them, for about a
year. Prior to that, the state's Department of Surplus Property took the
items, which it tried to auction off. That wasn't working well, however.

"Our warehouse was filling up with junk we couldn't get rid of," said
Matt Bender, a spokesman with the state Department of Surplus Property
in Sacramento.

It's not uncommon for passenger contraband from other airports to wind
up on an online auction site, said Nico Melendez, a TSA spokesman. When
it does, he said, it's not the government doing the selling but the
non-profit agencies the TSA turns the items over to from some airports
around the country.

At some airports, passengers can use envelopes to mail the banned items
to themselves. But with close parking lots allowing passengers to
quickly return forbidden items to their cars, that option is not offered
here.